Lossless compression is now an established means of reducing the data rate required for storing or transmitting a digital audio signal. One method of reducing the data rate of a multichannel signal is to apply matrixing so that dominant information is concentrated in some of the transmitted channels while the other channels carry relatively little information. For example, two-channel audio may have nearly the same waveform in the left and right channels if conveying a central sound image, in which case it is more efficient to encode the sum and difference of the two channels. This process is described in some detail in WO-A 96/37048, including the use of a cascade of ‘primitive matrix quantisers’ to achieve the matrixing in a perfectly invertible or lossless manner.
The process disclosed in WO-A 96/37048 also envisages the use of matrix quantisers to apply a matrix to a multichannel original digital signal in order to derive matrixed digital signals representing speaker feeds more suitable for general domestic listening. These matrixed signals may be recorded on a carrier such as a DVD, and the ordinary player will simply feed each matrixed signal to a loudspeaker. The advanced player however, may invert the effect of the matrix quantisers and thus reconstruct the original digital signal exactly in order to reproduce it in an alternative manner.
In a commercial application of DVD-Audio there is a requirement to combine the above two concepts so that a transmission system using lossless compression may also provide both a matrixed signal and an original signal. In this application the required matrixed signal has two channels whereas the original signal has more than two channels, thus additional information must be provided to allow the multichannel signal to be recovered; however, the additional information should not impose a computational overhead for decoders that wish to decode the two-channel matrixed signal only.
Currently, digital audio is often transmitted with 24 bits, and popular Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chips designed for audio such as the Motorola 56000 series also easily handle a 24-bit word. However the processing described in WO-A 96/37048 can generate numbers requiring a word width greater than the original signal. Because the use of ‘double-precision’ computation is prohibitively expensive, a method is needed to allow the processing to be substantially carried out while not requiring an increased word width.
Finally the consumer, having bought equipment designed to provide lossless reproduction, would like reassurance that the signal recovered is indeed lossless. Conventional parity and CRC checks within the encoded stream will show errors due to data corruption within the stream, but they will not expose errors due to matrixing or other algorithmic mismatch between an encoder and a decoder.